Читать книгу The Herodotus Encyclopedia - Группа авторов - Страница 341

JEREMY MCINERNEY

University of Pennsylvania

The term Amphictyony may refer to any regional federation of communities, such as the Calaurian League, a loose political and religious grouping of towns located around the Saronic Gulf. Their representatives met at the sanctuary of POSEIDON on Poros. Herodotus applies the term to a specific confederation, the Amphictyones (“Dwellers‐Around”), that is, twelve communities of the THERMOPYLAE region. Member states included the Magnetes and PERRHAEBIANS, conquered by the Thessalians in the sixth century BCE, and the Amphictyony’s origins probably go back to at least the seventh century (McInerney 1999, 163). By the classical period the Amphictyony would include member states from the Vale of TEMPE in the north to the PELOPONNESE in the south, but originally was much more compact. Participating states met at ANTHELA, which, according to Herodotus (7.200), was a village situated on a broad strip of land between the PHOENIX RIVER and Thermopylae. Here there was a temple of DEMETER Amphictyonis, a meeting place of the Amphictyonic states (Pylaea, 7.213), and a sanctuary of the hero AMPHICTYON. The combination of tutelary deity, meeting place used by representatives of the member states, and a cult of an eponymous hero is typical of federal unions in the ARCHAIC AGE.

By no later than the mid fifth century the Amphictyony had extended its control to the south side of PARNASSUS and administered the affairs of the Panhellenic sanctuary at DELPHI. One of the two annual meetings was held there, and the Amphictyony’s control of Delphi explains the growth of the organization. Herodotus (2.180) attributes the rebuilding of the temple of APOLLO, destroyed by FIRE in 548, to the Amphictyonic states, and he reports (5.62) that the ALCMAEONIDAE, in EXILE from ATHENS, took out a contract with the Amphictyony to rebuild the temple. Famously the contract was for a building in tufa, but the Alcmaeonidae completed the façade in Parian marble.

Although they controlled the administration of Delphi, the Amphictyones remained firmly connected to their northern cult center near Thermopylae. In recounting the fate of EPHIALTES, the traitor who led the Persians around the Spartan position at Thermopylae in 480, Herodotus (7.213) refers to a meeting of the Amphictyonic states at Pylaea. He reports that the pylagoroi (the representatives of the member states) declared Ephialtes an outlaw and put a price on his head. It was while serving as a pylagoros in 340 that the Athenian orator Aeschines reported the men of AMPHISSA for cultivating the Sacred Plain below Delphi, a denunciation that led to the Fourth Sacred War. The other representatives at the Amphictyonic meetings were called hieromnēmones, a broad term often applied to officials with priestly duties. The epitaphs erected in honor of the Greeks killed at Thermopylae, including SIMONIDES’ famous epigram beginning “Go tell the Spartans,” were commissioned by the Amphictyones, according to Herodotus (7.228).

SEE ALSO: Architecture (Temples); Panhellenism; Temples and Sanctuaries; Thessaly